#ripraw

Dear Proto-batch Professional,

Of the five ‘bots who made up the first group of Rescue Bot Academy recruits, Wedge was the first to emerge by a significant margin. However, he was kidnapped moments after he’d emerged from the Well of All Sparks and shipped to Trepan’s neo-Decepticon blacksite for reconditioning, which greatly stunted any potential social and emotional growth that he might have made otherwise. 

As for the rest… Optimus Prime’s sacrifice reignited the Well of All Sparks; before long its frantic pulses of new lives settled into a more reasonable rhythm that shaped the lives of the new postwar Cybertronian civilization, and a new batch of protoforms arose once every few days. Thus, Medix was a member of batch 221, Whirl—formerly “Downwash”—hailed from batch 238, and Hoist batch 245. 

Dear Chompazoid Champion,

Shockwave created the first Chompazoids after the fall of Cybertron, a side project that he worked on for many years in the ruins of Nuon City. While his earlier experiments—on the Insecticons, the Dinobots, the Forged—attempted to graft genetic information onto a living test subject, the Chompazoid project was far more ambitious—he attempted to create a hybrid, a superior organism that drew upon the strengths of multiple different Cybertronian organisms. Though the Chompazoids used the Dinobot “genome” as a base, Shockwave spliced in many traits from other lifeforms. Thanks to an infusion of Predacon CNA, for instance, they would be born with a powerful internal fusion reactor—not to breathe fire, but to burn up inorganic material and turn it into pure energy. Their jaws—a mixture of Sharkticon and Scraplet—would allow them to chew through solid durabyllium, and their modified brain modules would fill their minds with the mindless, all-consuming hunger of the Insecticons. Finally, his creations received the Cybertronian ability to transform into vehicles and machinery—but when the last of the energon he'd allocated for the project ran out, Shockwave put his specimens into cryogenic storage and turned his attention back to the less energy-intensive task of simply cloning a new Predacon.

After the end of the war, Cybertronians began resettling the city of Nuon, which had been left comparatively intact by the war—until an Autobot cleanup crew that consisted of Vectorium, Catapult, Sledgehammer, and Stormsong stumbled upon Shockwave’s backup lab quite by accident. When they thoughtlessly deactivated the stasis chambers keeping the newborn Chompazoids under control, the onrushing brood promptly devoured the four and escaped captivity. The Chompazoids were far smarter than Shockwave had intended, and proved able to outhink, outwit, and outfight their pursuers; the largest and most intelligent Chompazoid, a hulking brute by the name of “Underbite,” rampaged through Nuon for hours, eating everything in sight before the Cybertronian provisional government could martial a coordinated response—it took Ultra Magnus, Bulkhead, Ripraw, and all four Dinobots to finally subdue and arrest him. Ever the braggart, Underbite became inordinately proud of his famous rampage and boasted endlessly about it to everyone who crossed his path.

As for the other Chompazoids… well, I am sorry to say many did indeed succumb to their primal instincts and turned to villainy in an attempt to sate their hunger. This is not to say that all Chompazoids are inherently evil, of course, and many successfully integrated themselves into Cybertronian society before Cyclonus staged his coup. The Chompazoid Molar, for instance, became a kind and supportive mentor as part of Cybertron’s provisional tutelage system.